Consumers seeking to have their vehicle serviced or repaired are often frustrated by a large degree of uncertainty about how much the work they would like to have done will cost. They often find that repair cost estimates for the work vary widely between vehicle repair shops, and the estimates they receive might vary significantly from the actual cost of the repairs. Further, such estimates are often not immediately available to the consumer; they may need to call into a repair shop and have a conversation with a mechanic about their problem, or may even need to take in the vehicle to each repair shop to have it looked at before an estimate will be given. Because it would be extremely time-intensive for a consumer in need of vehicle repair work to solicit estimates—much less do some level of background research about the repair shop they solicited the estimate from to ensure that it is accurate—consumers often must settle for paying significantly more than they could otherwise pay to have work done on their vehicles.
Some services have attempted to address this problem. For example, some web interfaces have been able to make available to consumers a range of estimates for a particular service, so that consumers can at least attempt to identify a good deal. Others provide users with information about how to identify the potential sources of the problem and important symptoms that they should look for, potentially streamlining the process of soliciting estimates from many different firms. However, consumers still do not have a service available to them that allows them to accurately search for and compare quotes, not estimates, from a number of different repair shops in their area without manually collecting the quotes from all of the different shops themselves.